Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, political critic and activist. He is an institute professor and professor emeritus in the department of linguistics and philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. History educator Daniel Falcone spoke with Chomsky in his Cambridge office on May 14.

Daniel Falcone for Truthout: I wanted to ask you some questions about education in the 21st century.

Chomsky: Not sure the topic exists.

Falcone: Yes, right. Well before I would go into discussing the 21st century, can you comment on this country's history with education, and what tradition do you think we have grown out of in terms of education?

Chomsky: That's an interesting question. The US was kind of a pioneer in mass public education. Actually, this here is land-grant university which is part of the big 19th-century expansion of our education through federal grant. And most of them are out in the West, but this is one. And also, just-for-children mass public education, which is a pretty good thing. It wasn't a major contribution, but it had qualifications. For one thing, it was partly concerned with taking a country of independent farmers, many of them pretty radical. You go back to the late 19th century, the Farmer's Alliance was coming out of Texas and was the most radical popular Democratic organization anywhere in history, I think. It's hard to believe if you look at Texas today.

And these were independent farmers. They stick up for their rights - they didn't want to be slaves. And they had to be driven into factories and turned into tools for someone else. There's a lot of resistance to it. So a lot of public education was, in fact, concerned with trying to teach independent people to become workers in an industrial system.

And there was more to it than that. Actually, Ralph Waldo Emerson commented on it. He said something like this: he hears a lot of political leaders saying that we have to have mass public education. And the reason is that millions of people are getting the vote, and we have to educate them to keep them from our throats. In other words, we have to train them in obedience and servility, so they're not going to think through the way the world works and come after our throats.

So, it's kind of a mixture. There's a lot of good things about it, but there were also, you know, the property class. The people who concentrate wealth don't do things just out of the goodness of their hearts for the most part, but in order to maintain their position of dominance and then extend their power. And it's been kind of that battle all the way through.

Right now, we happen to be in a general period of regression, not just in education. A lot of what's happening is sort of backlash to the 60s; the 60s were a democratizing period. And the society became a lot more civilized and there was a lot of concern about education across the spectrum - liberals, conservatives and bipartisan. It's kind of interesting to read the liberal literature in the 70s, but there was concern about what they called, at the liberal end, "the failures of the institutions responsible for indoctrinating the young." That's the phrase that was used, which expresses the liberal view quite accurately. You got to keep them from our throats. So the indoctrination of the young wasn't working properly. That was actually Samuel Huntington, professor of government at Harvard, kind of a liberal stalwart. And he co-authored a book-length report called The Crisis of Democracy. There was something that had to be done to increase indoctrination, to beat back the democratizing wave. The economy was sharply modified and went through a liberal period, with radical inequality, stagnation, financial institutions, all that stuff. Student debt started to skyrocket, which is quite important. But that's a technique of indoctrination in itself. It's never been studied. Important things usually never get studied; it's just putting together the bits of information about it. One can at least be suspicious that skyrocketing student debt is a device of indoctrination. It's very hard to imagine that there's any economic reason for it. Other countries' education is free, like Mexico's, and that is a poor country.

Finland's, which has the best educational system in the world, by the records at least, is free. Germany's is free. The United States in the 1950s was a much poorer country. But education was basically free: the GI Bill and so on. So there's no real economic reason for high-priced higher education and skyrocketing student debt. There are a lot of factors. And one of them, probably, is just that students are trapped.

The other is what's happening to teachers like you. They're turning into adjuncts, temporary workers who have no rights, you know. I don't have to tell you what it's like, you can tell me.

But the more you can get the graduate students, temporary workers, two-tier payment, the more people you have under control - and all of that's been going on. And now it's institutionalized with No Child Left Behind/Race to the Top; teach to the test - worst possible way of teaching. But it is a disciplinary technique. Schools are designed to teach the test. You don't have to worry about students thinking for themselves, challenging, raising questions. And you see it down to the lowest level of detail. I give a lot of talks in communities and places where people are concerned about education and I've had teachers come up to me and say afterwards, you know, I teach sixth grade. A little girl came up after class and said she was interested in something that came up in class, and wanted to know how to look into it. And I tell her, you can't do it; you got to study for the test. Your future depends on it; my salary depends on it.

And that's happening all over. And it has the obvious technique of dumbing down the population, and also controlling them. And it's bipartisan. The Obama administration is pushing it. Also, an effort to kill the schools - the charter school movement vouchers, all this kind of stuff is nothing but an effort to destroy the public education system. It claims that it gives the parents choices, but that's ridiculous.

For most people, they can't make the choices; there are not any. It's like saying everyone has a choice to become a millionaire. You do, in a way: there's no law against it.

Falcone: You have indicated in some of your writings the effects of Taylorism - a management method that breaks tasks down into small parts to increase efficiency - as a form of on-job control. Does our educational system foster a form of on-job control?

The global economic crisis of
2008 and the current debt crisis in the Eurozone have triggered debates about
not only the future of the Euro and European integration in general, but also
about the history and nature of capitalism. This workshop brings together
scholars who have been participating in such debates from the disciplinary
perspectives of anthropology, economics, history, political science, and
sociology. Key themes of the conference include: the practice and theory of
capitalism in postwar Europe; capitalism, the European Union, and the
foundation for an integrated Europe; the neoliberal turn of capitalism in the
1970s; the transition to capitalism in post-socialist states and enlargement;
crises of capitalism.

Produced by the Jean Monnet
Centre of Excellence and the Center for European Studies. Free and open to the
public.

Jean Monnet Centres of Excellence are
clearly labelled institutes or structures specialising in European integration
studies. They pool the scientific, human and documentary resources to European
integration studies at the participating higher education institution(s).

Following World War II,
France was in severe need of reconstruction and completely dependent on coal
from Germany's main remaining coal-mining areas, the Ruhr and Saar areas. (The German
coal fields in Upper Silesia
had been handed over to Polish administration by the Allies in 1945, see Oder-Neisse line.)

In 1945 Monnet proposed the
Monnet Plan, als known as
the ‘Theory of l'Engrenage’ […] It included taking control of the remaining
German coal-producing areas and reditecting the production away from the German
industry and into the French, thus permanently weakening Germany and raising
the French economy considerably above its pre-war levels. The plan was adopted
by Charles de Gaulle in early 1946.

Later that year, Monnet successfully
negotiated the Blum–Byrnes
agreement with the United States, which cleared France from a $2.8
billon debt (mostly World War I loans) and provided the country with an additional
low-interest loan of $650 million. In return, France opened its cinemas to
American movies.

The Monnet plan was proposed by French civil servant Jean Monnet after the end
of World War II. It
was a reconstruction plan for France
that proposed giving France control over the German coal and steel
areas of the Ruhr area
and Saar and using these
resources to bring France to 150% of pre-war industrial production. The plan
was adopted by Charles de
Gaulle in early 1946. The plan would permanently limit Germany's industrial
capacity, and greatly increase France's economic power.

Last week, the U.S. Senate voted down an amendment by Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) to restore $4.1 billion in food stamp cuts—by reducing corporate welfare to a handful of crop insurance companies, mostly based overseas. Only 26 senators voted “yes.”

But we can’t blame obstructionist Republicans. Twenty-eight Senate Democrats joined with all voting Republicans to defeat this crucial amendment. If these cuts are allowed, around 500,000 low-income households will lose an average of $90 in monthly benefits.

Food Stamps are already being cut as the federal stimulus dries up, and these proposed new cuts—from both parties—will only make it worse. Given that so many people are working for fewer hours or lower wages, now is not the time to cut such essential benefits.